Data, DataViz, and Stats with the Stars
Brad Pitt: Throwing it All Away
Steven Stigler (2016) in “The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom”:
- One of the Big Ideas in Statistics is: Aggregation
- How is it revolutionary?
- By stipulating that, given a number of observations, you can actually gain information by throwing information away
- In taking a simple arithmetic mean, we discard the individuality of the measures, subsuming them to one summary.
Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Dancing Men
In the Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Dancing Men, a criminal known to one of the characters communicates with her using a childish/child-like drawing which looks like this:
How would Holmes decipher this message?
Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Dancing Men
- Using Conjectures: Symbols -> Letters
- Holmes deduces that the most common letter in the message is “E”
- He then deduces that the second most common letter is “T”
- Based on well-known Counts of letters (Zipf’s Law)
Research Question
Are there more penguins of some species than there are in others?
Research Question
Are the penguin polulations on different island the same?
Jack and Rose lived happily ever after?
- What are the chances?
- What did the chances depend on?
titanic
Quantitative Data
None.
Qualitative Data
survived: (chr) yes or nostatus: (chr) Class of Travel, else “crew”age: (chr) Adult, Childsex: (chr) Male / Female.
Note
What is the dependence of survived upon sex?
Note
- Note the huge imbalance in
survivedwithsex - Men have clearly perished in larger numbers than women.
- Colouring shows large positive residuals for men who died, and large negative residuals for women who died.
So sadly Jack is far more likely to have died than Rose.
How does survived depend upon status?
Note
- Crew has seen deaths in large numbers,
- as seen by the large negative residual for crew-survivals.
- First Class passengers have had speedy access to the boats and have survived in larger proportions than say second or third class.
- There is a large positive residual for first-class survivals.
- Rose travelled
first classand Jack wasthird class. So again the odds are stacked against him.
What are these Residuals anyhow?
When differences between the actual and expected counts are large, we deduce that one Qual variable has an effect on the other Qual variable. (speaking counts-wise or ratio-wise)
